Perfect
by ainokitsune
Summary: Bad babies get rabies.


I wrote this in about 3 days as a last-minute Halloween thing (a while ago, obviously). So it's creepy.

**

* * *

Perfect**

_Hush-a-bye babies  
Hush quite a lot  
Bad babies get rabies  
And have to be shot. _

–_Sellar & Yeatman._

The scream lingers, and Dean shivers and paws at his ears a bit, then works his tongue over the film of adrenaline coating the roof of his mouth and swallows clumsily. He doesn't think his legs will support him and so he crawls, carefully, through the field of broken glass on his elbows and his knees. The air shivers with sickness and saliva collects in his mouth. He resists the urge to spit and swallows again instead—the taste hollow like sleeplessness and hunger.

Sam's still there, in the middle of the mess, a huddle of clothes and hair and skin. (_screaming and screaming and screaming_) He doesn't make a sound when Dean reaches him; doesn't stir. Dean shakes his head against the echo still rolling around in his head and heaves himself up onto his knees, then reaches out for his brother.

"Sammy," he breathes. "Sam?" Grasps at his brother's sleeve. It sinks under his fingers, collapsing like a deflated balloon, and Dean feels the bones of his hands collide with each other. He shudders; the skin at the back of his neck prickles.

_No. Oh no._

"Sam." He whispers, reaching for the curve of his brother's skull, and resting his palm lightly, so lightly…and it sinks. It sinks down, depresses under his touch and Dean yanks his hand back and claps a hand over his mouth so he won't throw up all over…all over…

"_Sammy_…" his voice breaks—a tiny, desperate noise.

And Sam stirs.

Dean's scrambling backward before he even realizes it, eyes achingly wide, mouth hanging open. _Stupid—oh God, Sam—_ The thing, the…_shape_ of his brother moves, makes a strange high-pitched noise like a groan, a distressed whine, and Dean reacts. Every nerve in his body aches toward that sound, his brother in pain. His brother _needing_.

"Hey," he murmurs, reaching out, for the arm he'd just seen collapse, for the face that might not be there. "Hey, S-Sam…"

His brother lifts his head.

"Dean?"

Dean doesn't move. His hands stay in the air—frozen. He can't feel them, or his skin.

"I feel—Dean, I feel…" Sam shivers, and folds his arms across his belly. Leans forward, slightly, shaking his head, mouth working a little. "What's going on? I feel—Dean, what's happening? Where are we? I can't…I don't…" he tilts forward and his forehead bumps the side of Dean's arm and that, at least, stirs him to action. Dean grabs Sam, tight as he can, visual dissonance tickling his nausea, shuddering up and down his skin. He's cold. It's cold. The whole place has gone bitter and clammy. Sam shudders and Dean, with great care, gathers his little brother into his lap.

"My skin, Dean," Sam mumbles, as though his tongue has swelled. It's not that, though. It's that his mouth has shrunk. Teeth and bones. Everything.

Dean sits still with his arm full of heavy, mostly empty clothes. Sam, tiny and impossible, jerks awkwardly and twists his head, and then his arms and his joints. Stretches them in terrifying ways, with the elasticity of youth.

"What's wrong with your skin?" Dean whispers, but he can already tell. He swallows again. His mouth tastes like chemicals.

"Sam," he says helplessly, and Sam ceases his strange contortions and snaps his head back up to meet Dean's eyes.

"I'm…_in_ here," he moans, hooking his fingers against his own face. _"Dean."_

"Shh," Dean whispers, rocking him gently, staring blankly at the far wall, the shattered windows, the blue sky beyond. "It's okay. It's okay. It's okay."

* * *

He's perfect. He's clean-limbed and bright eyed and his clothes don't fit, of course they don't, they'd be too big for most fully-grown adult men. Never mind a child less than four feet tall.

Dean's afraid to move from this place, from the site of Sam's...change. And it _is_ Sam, of that he's almost certain. Not some monster or pretender or changeling. It must be. He'd been the one screaming.

Dean picks listlessly through the pile of Sam's abandoned clothes and weapons as his…his brother wanders barefoot around the glass strewn room, trailing blood from sudden fresh wounds he doesn't seem to notice. Dean hisses through his teeth, ignores the droplets of fresh red to trace the pattern of older blood worked in brushstrokes over the concrete floor, radiating away from where Sam had lain. Someone slaughtered a pig here, he thinks, or some other large animal. Dean hadn't made it in time to stop that part of the ritual, but the amount of blood, dark and dry and flaking, is unmistakable. He finds remnants of herbs in the corners, and his fingers trace wax and bring up chalk dust in places where there is no blood.

When he looks up from his examination of the floor he sees Sam, shirt trailing on the ground, slipping out into the hall.

"_Shit—"_ Dean lurches upright and half-stumbles after his brother, out into the hall. They both leave tracks in the dust, Sam's footprints small and bloody, Dean's heavy, and hesitant.

He finds his—his little brother by a window, face turned up, washed in the sunlight. He blinks briefly at Dean, and waves a hand vaguely at the sky, fingernails flashing in the light.

"Sun's going down," Sam says.

"Yeah." Dean's voice is faint.

"I can see the evening star," his brother adds.

"Can you?" And Dean is proud of himself. Proud that his voice doesn't tremble. That his hand doesn't stray to the weapon at his back.

That his eyes flicker only briefly to Sam's shadow on the wall.

His mouth, though, has gone dry, and he has to work to create some saliva before he can clear his throat and add, "We should, um. We should probably get out of here."

Sam doesn't smile, and doesn't look at him. But he nods.

* * *

The shadow hulks behind Sam, huge and malformed. Dean doesn't know why he didn't see it at the very beginning. They go back to the motel and Dean scrounges some clothes for his brother, who spends his time wandering the small space running his fingers over things as though they've taken on some new, strange significance. Dean tries not to look at the shadow, tries to ignore the way it twists and seems to be _pushing_. He can't find its head. He doesn't know if it has one.

"Dean," Sam says. He's crawled up onto the bed and bounced a little, expression clinical, hair flying. He pushes it back now and gazes at Dean from too-large eyes. "What are we going to do?"

Behind him the shadow rears up. Dean might be imagining it, but he swears he sees it flicker on Sam's skin, push against it.

Sam's arm distends.

Dean swallows and looks away. Shoves the clip back in his handgun and tucks it gently into his waistband. Keeps his hands soft and steady.

"Were gonna do what we have to," Dean says. "I'll take care of you."

Sam nods, and smiles a little, hesitantly. The shadow extends. Dean thinks he can see fingers.

* * *

"Don't walk in the glass," Dean warns, and of course Sam ignores him. He goes shuffling through the shards in his grey stolen sneakers as if Dean hadn't spent half an hour cleaning and wrapping his filleted feet back at the motel. He even stoops down and plucks a curved, wicked shard from the mess and holds it up to the light. Dean ignores the way Sam's fingers expand and lengthen. Ignores the refracted light on the wall.

"Did you know glass is really a liquid?" Sam asks brightly. "It's highly viscous, but that's what it is. A liquid." The shadow humps up behind him, reaching out for the light. Sammy's teeth are coated in blood…

Dean looks away.

"Tryin' to work here, man," he mutters. Sam gives an annoyed grunt and Dean hears the sound of discarded glass, shattering.

"Maybe it'll go back on its own," Sam says, suddenly plastering himself to Dean's side. Dean bites the inside of his cheek in shock. "I don't even know what could cause something like this."

"Magic," Dean answers shortly, and peels his brother off. "There's junk in the corner, blood on the floor."

"But it changed _reality_," Sam says.

"Yeah." Dean nods. "For now."

Sam shrugs and darts away to the window, standing in the blazing sunlight. Dean can't see the shadow. He watches the dust motes drift around his brother, glinting in the sun. Outside the grass is green and a line of trees whispers in the summer breeze. Sam raises his hands and spreads his fingers against the light.

Dean doesn't draw his gun, but it's a very near thing.

* * *

At night the shadows all stream together and it's only in the light of the motel room that Dean can see it. So he keeps the lights low and lets the huge shape blur into the shadows of the beds, lamps, TV and chair, and his own suddenly too-large shadow, thrown across the wall.

Dean has never felt so huge, so clumsy. Sam is suddenly fragile. His fingers are less deft now, and he complains about it the next morning at breakfast.

"Look," he gripes, "It's like buttering toast is some kind of dexterity test or something."

Dean grunts. Sam's still Sam, after all. Just…more so.

They go back to the site one more time. Someday the building will be knocked down, or renovated. Plowed under and left to go to seed. Dean imagines grass and trees. That's what it was before, after all. Green fields under the sky.

Sam says, "I want to know who did this to me."

Dean grunts noncommittally.

"Come on," Sam says, "Dean, come _on._" And that's old Sam. Kind of whining, kind of pleading. Dean follows him inside.

Everything's exactly where they left it, and the morning sun plays among the glass. Sam seems to take special pleasure in crushing the tiny shards into dust under his rubber soles. He's lost that clinical, detached look. He smiles more.

The shadow hunkers in the corner, picked out by the radiant light. Dean can see its head now, its long lanky arms. He's watched, more than once, as its arm stretched out. Reached out.

Dean's been watching.

He knows what he has to do.

"Sam," he says, and when his brother looks at him he's fully in the sunlight; bathed in it. His limbs and hair are bleached by it, eyes washed of color. Teeth small and white as he smiles. Dust falls and falls around him and the floor glistens. The light streams right past him, pinning his shadow to the wall. His arms don't grow and his fingers don't distend. His smile stays right on his face where it belongs. Everything's right where it needs to be.

"Sam," Dean says again, as he pulls out his handgun and lines up the shot, "Just stay right where you are."

Even the noise of the gunshot can't shatter the perfect morning.

-end-


End file.
